The Secret Lives of Words: Labor Day, union politics and the Equinox

Rick LaFleur More Content Now

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Aug 28, 2018 at 11:08 AMSep 1, 2018 at 7:17 AM

U.S. labor union officials, inspired by union celebrations of Canadian workers in the 1870s, began pressing for a holiday to recognize the contributions of the American workforce to our nation’s well-being. In 1887, Oregon established a "Labor Day" holiday, and other states quickly followed. In the aftermath of the 1894 Pullman railroad strike, which had led to the deaths and injuries of dozens of workers at the hands of federal troops, President Grover Cleveland signed into law a congressional bill establishing Labor Day as a federal holiday, hoping the conciliatory measure might improve his chances at re-election.

Cleveland was not re-elected, but the celebration of American workers that he grudgingly endorsed has continued to be held annually on the first Monday of September. With the politics and violence of its origin now generally ignored, the day has long been viewed as the unofficial end of summer, marked by parades, family gatherings, and cookouts.

Labor issues were a quite different matter in the ancient Mediterranean world, where most heavy work — in the fields, in such factories as there were, and even in the homes of the wealthy — was carried out by slaves. Much of the slave population derived from nearly constant warfare. Captured enemy soldiers were enslaved, not imprisoned (there were no Gitmos), and added to the labor force. Others became slaves by being born to slave parents. Even the poorer classes of citizens in antiquity were subject to debt slavery and serfdom (a grim reality in some countries even today).

The financial woes Greece has suffered in recent years are nothing new. In the sixth century B.C. the Athenian lawmaker and reformer Solon found economic conditions for poorer citizens so abysmal that he issued a radical proclamation called the Seisachtheia, or "shaking off of burdens." SEISmology, the study of earthquakes, derives from that same seis- root, and Solon’s SEISmic reforms did indeed shake the Greek economy to its core.

The gap between rich and poor had so widened — a circumstance familiar to us in 21st century America — that to Solon, regarded throughout antiquity as one of the Seven Sages of Greece, the only solution seemed to be the wholesale cancellation of debts, limits on the amount of property that could legally be amassed by the wealthiest families (the Athenian "one per cent"), and the abolition of enslavement for debt. Were he alive today, Solon would doubtless favor raising the minimum wage, expanding social security and healthcare, and enacting other reforms aimed at mitigating the extremes of income inequality.

Labor is in origin a Latin noun and has given us such derivatives as LABORer, LABORatory (a scientific "work" place), and COLLABORate, meaning "to work together" (from col-/con- as in COLlect, "to gather together," and COLlude, "to plot together, CONspire"). Ancient Rome didn’t have an exact counterpart to our unions, but there were numerous COLLABORative guilds (collegia, as in COLLEGe/COLLEAGue/COLLEGIality) organized by merchants and workers — even freedmen and occasionally slaves — to advance their business endeavors and influence elections.

From Pompeii in particular we have numerous electoral signs called programmata ("programs," from a Greek term meaning literally "public writings"), painted on storefronts and other building walls, advocating the election of one candidate or another. In one such notice a female tavern-keeper named Asellina encourages her patrons to support her favorite candidate for mayor, while the city’s fruit-vendors posted a sign for a different mayoral wannabe. The ballplayers’ guild painted a notice on a hotel wall publicizing their choice for aedile, the public-works commissioner.

After Labor Day, just as election season in the U.S. begins to heat up, September brings us to the end of summer. With the autumnal equinox, on the 22nd this year, when the hours of daylight are EQUal (from aEQUus, like EQUality and EQUity, which we all strive for) to those of the night (nox/noctis, as in NOCTurnal and Chopin’s NOCTurnes, dreamy, nighttime compositions), the days start getting shorter. Maybe the longer, chilly autumn nights will help insure that cooler minds prevail at the polls in November, and that the tavern-keepers, fruit-vendors, ballplayers, and all our other American workers may look forward to, not only a more prosperous new year, but to a saner and more civil one as well.

— Rick LaFleur is retired from 40 years of teaching Latin language and literature at the University of Georgia, which during his tenure came to have the largest Latin enrollment of all of the nation’s colleges and universities; his latest book is "Ubi Fera Sunt," a lively, lovingly wrought translation into classical Latin of Maurice Sendak’s classic, "Where the Wild Things Are," ranked first on TIME magazine’s 2015 list of the top 100 children’s books of all time.

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